A ZCCA Tip

Just a skip from Rokycany, on the way towards Skořice from Mirošov, there is a road sign for a turnoff, but the nearby village of Myt’ is only marked by a board nailed to a tree. The fact that the village is divided into Upper and Lower Myť is no longer mentioned anywhere, so I’m not going to get into further detail either about this place. But to paint the complete picture of local geographical terminology, I could add that both parts are located at the foot of Bambule hill.
One Myt’ garden is humane, moving and artistically authentic. After the divorce, the garden will belong to Jožka, but it will be his ex-wife Eva who will be looking at it from the windows of her neighboring house. The artist, unburdened by any museum or gallery experience, conceptually vented the stress he was under from the broken marriage in a well-thought-out, self-contained, evolving installation/performance piece.
One day, his ex-wife returned home from work and they talked about what they had done that day. She’d planted 356 trees. Jožka answered, “And I made six graves.” Indeed, the current flowerbeds had become graves with all the necessary credentials, save for the bodies rotting underground. Even in his over-sensitive state of mind, the artist was able to avoid the simple but vulgar solution of making a grave for himself and his ex-wife (conversationally deceased), but preferred instead to tenderly substitute the now dead family roles. While he’d always kept dogs, she’d had cats. Gold letters on marble slabs thus spelled out the names of the pets of the now separated household: Rudolf, Ježek, Stázina, Pavlínka, Mandela, Čendíček. This turns out to be all the more ridiculous when you discover the alleged animal corpses lazily reposed in the sun on their respective graves.
Fortunately, art has not yet lost the ability to infiltrate our lives with its ridiculously healing power. It’s not tactics, calculation but self-therapy. Without invitations, openings and promotion, the installation naturally became a part of the surroundings and the artist’s everyday life. The individual episodes of this on-going life performance, until now passed on only by word of mouth, have become legendary.
When a land surveyor preparing materials for the couple’s upcoming legal settlement asked whether the graves had been in the garden before, Jožka Kunc just took a bucket of water, went to water the graves, lit candles in the little lanterns and walked away in silence.

01.03.2000